Unexpected Surprise

Don't you love unexpected surprises!  

This may seem like an odd post in early January....but you'll see that it's just the right time to write about this Foxtail Fern....again.

I've had it for quite a while.....maybe 8+ years. It has lived on the patio in Lexington in the summer and wintered inside for all these years.  It generally looked pretty shabby when I took it back out each spring but it always bounced back with lush new growth.  

This photo was taken this last October. I had almost given up on it in the spring....but gave it one more summer on the patio.  It did not disappoint....AGAIN!

When the weather started to get cold and a hard frost was inevitable.... I almost dumped it thinking I had gotten my money's worth. I was moving this winter and I just wasn't sure where I would winter it at the condo....I only have so many windows.

But I had a change of heart.  It was completely root bound....but I had to try and divide it and save at least a piece of it.  It would be lovely on my patio in Maine...or even at the front door.  It was a lot of work to pry the roots apart without too much damage....but I was able to split it and get two usable pieces into new pots with fresh soil.

They looked terrible at first....then got even worse....I wasn't very hopeful. These nice green branches completely dried up and I kept cutting them off until there were only a few left.  But I kept a the faith and have watered them when they were dry.              

Just a few days ago I watered the pot in Lexington and found a little unexpected surprise.  There on one of the remaining old branches were a couple of red berries....such a treat!  I looked back at the blog for posts about the fern and last March I wrote a similar post....with a similar title so one might think I shouldn't have been all that surprised.  I guess that's one of the advantages of getting older...you get to be surprised over and over.

https://joyfulputtering.blogspot.com/2019/03/little-surprise.html

And I was tickled to see new growth coming up from the soil! 

Maybe I will end up with a plant on the patio this summer after all.

This is the other pot that I had already taken to the condo. It looked even worse....kind of like a pandemic plant. All the old branches have been cut off...but new ones are coming.  We'll see what a summer outside will do for it.....maybe I'll have an unexpected surprise!